Leave It to Psmith, P. G. Wodehouse [novels to read .txt] 📗

persistence of Psmith to take up her time, and Phyllis and her troubles had been thrust into the background. She confessed, despising herself, that she had hardly given Phyllis a thought.

And all the while this Mr. Keeble had been in a position to scatter largess, thousands of pounds of it, to undeserving people like Freddie. Why, a word from her about Phyllis would have⁠ ⁠…

“Two thousand pounds?” she repeated dizzily. “Mr. Keeble!”

“Absolutely!” cried Freddie radiantly. The first shock of looking into her eyes had passed, and he was now revelling in that occupation.

“What for?”

Freddie’s rapt gaze flickered. Love, he perceived, had nearly caused him to be indiscreet.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he mumbled. “He’s just giving it me, you know, don’t you know.”

“Did you simply go to him and ask him for it?”

“Well⁠—er⁠—well, yes. That was about the strength of it.”

“And he didn’t object?”

“No. He seemed rather pleased.”

“Pleased!” Eve found breathing difficult. She was feeling rather like a man who suddenly discovers that the hole in his back yard which he has been passing nonchalantly for months is a goldmine. If the operation of extracting money from Mr. Keeble was not only easy but also agreeable to the victim⁠ ⁠… She became aware of a sudden imperative need for Freddie’s absence. She wanted to think this thing over.

“Well, then,” said Freddie, “coming back to it, will you?”

“What?” said Eve, distrait.

“Marry me, you know. What I mean to say is, I worship the very ground you walk on, and all that sort of rot⁠ ⁠… I mean, and all that. And now that you realise that I’m going to get this couple of thousand⁠ ⁠… and the bookie’s business⁠ ⁠… and whatnot, I mean to say⁠ ⁠…”

“Freddie,” said Eve tensely, expressing her harassed nerves in a voice that came hotly through clenched teeth, “go away!”

“Eh?”

“I don’t want to marry you, and I’m sick of having to keep on telling you so. Will you please go away and leave me alone?” She stopped. Her sense of fairness told her that she was working off on her hapless suitor venom which should have been expended on herself. “I’m sorry, Freddie,” she said, softening; “I didn’t mean to be such a beast as that. I know you’re awfully fond of me, but really, really I can’t marry you. You don’t want to marry a girl who doesn’t love you, do you?”

“Yes, I do,” said Freddie stoutly. “If it’s you, I mean. Love is a tiny seed that coldness can wither, but if tended and nurtured in the fostering warmth of an honest heart⁠ ⁠…”

“But, Freddie.”

“Blossoms into a flower,” concluded Freddie rapidly. “What I mean to say is, love would come after marriage.”

“Nonsense!”

“Well, that’s the way it happened in ‘A Society Mating.’ ”

“Freddie,” said Eve, “I really don’t want to talk any more. Will you be a dear and just go away? I’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”

“Oh, thinking?” said Freddie, impressed. “Right ho!”

“Thank you so much.”

“Oh⁠—er⁠—not at all. Well, pip-pip.”

“Goodbye.”

“See you later, what?”

“Of course, of course.”

“Fine! Well, toodle-oo!”

And the Hon. Freddie, not ill-pleased⁠—for it seemed to him that at long last he detected signs of melting in the party of the second part⁠—swivelled round on his long legs and started for home.

III

The little town of Market Blandings was a peaceful sight as it slept in the sun. For the first time since Freddie had left her, Eve became conscious of a certain tranquillity as she entered the old grey High Street, which was the centre of the place’s life and thought. Market Blandings had a comforting air of having been exactly the same for centuries. Troubles might vex the generations it housed, but they did not worry that lichened church with its sturdy foursquare tower, nor those red-roofed shops, nor the age-old inns whose second stories bulged so comfortably out over the pavements. As Eve walked in slow meditation towards the Emsworth Arms, the intensely respectable hostelry which was her objective, archways met her gaze, opening with a picturesque unexpectedness to show heartening glimpses of ancient nooks all cool and green. There was about the High Street of Market Blandings a suggestion of a slumbering cathedral close. Nothing was modern in it except the moving-picture house⁠—and even that called itself an Electric Theatre, and was ivy-covered and surmounted by stone gables.

On second thoughts, that statement is too sweeping. There was one other modern building in the High Street⁠—Jno. Banks, Hairdresser, to wit, and Eve was just coming abreast of Mr. Banks’s emporium now.

In any ordinary surroundings these premises would have been a tolerably attractive sight, but in Market Blandings they were almost an eyesore; and Eve, finding herself at the door, was jarred out of her reverie as if she had heard a false note in a solemn anthem. She was on the point of hurrying past, when the door opened and a short, solid figure came out. And at the sight of this short, solid figure Eve stopped abruptly.

It was with the object of getting his grizzled locks clipped in preparation for the County Ball that Joseph Keeble had come to Mr. Banks’s shop as soon as he had finished lunch. As he emerged now into the High Street he was wondering why he had permitted Mr. Banks to finish off the job with a heliotrope-scented hair-wash. It seemed to Mr. Keeble that the air was heavy with heliotrope, and it came to him suddenly that heliotrope was a scent which he always found particularly objectionable.

Ordinarily Joseph Keeble was accustomed to show an iron front to hairdressers who tried to inflict lotions upon him; and the reason his vigilance had relaxed under the ministrations of Jno. Banks was that the second post, which arrived at the castle at the luncheon hour, had brought him a plaintive letter from his stepdaughter Phyllis⁠—the second he had had from her since the one which had caused him to tackle his masterful wife in the smoking-room. Immediately after the conclusion of his business deal with the Hon. Freddie, he had written to Phyllis in a vein of optimism rendered